YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

WHO OWNED LASSO’S CHANSONS?
Richard Freedman
Haverford College
In 1571, King Charles IX granted the composer Orlando di Lasso a special authorial
privilege that gave him exclusive control over who might print, distribute, and sell
his musical works in France. The French authorial privilege, and the remarkable power
it invested in Lasso, was wholly without precedent in the history of French music
printing. In the past, French privileges were in principle a form of commercial protection
for printers rather than a means of guarding intellectual property. No composer
before Lasso had ever been guaranteed an official voice in the control of his
creative work in France. Despite Lasso’s authority, however, his secular works were
reprinted (with new, spiritual texts) by a small circle of Huguenot editors active in
La Rochelle, Geneva, and London. As I hope to show, the appearance of Lasso’s chansons
in both their ‘authentic’ and ‘counterfeit’ editions can reveal how broader concerns
of authorship and piracy were important parts of the culture of printed books
already in the sixteenth century. They also can reflect on patterns of intellectual
property and public thought that are still with us today in varying forms.
Before turning to Lasso’s remarkable authorial privilege, we should first pause
here to offer a very brief summary of his career: he lived between 1532 and 1594.
Originally from Mons (Hainaut), already by his twenty-first birthday Lasso was chapel
master at the church of the Lateran in Rome. Between 1564 and his death some thirty
years later he served as musical director of the Bavarian court in Munich. Composer
of over thirteen-hundred works in every imaginable genre (and just about every imaginable
European language) Lasso cultivated an acute awareness of the importance of
the relatively new medium of print, actively collaborating with a long string of prominent
music printers in Antwerp, Paris, Munich, and Venice. The story of Lasso’s setting
of French texts in print (he wrote about 150 in all) nicely articulates this aspect
of his career. Written over a course of several decades and published in anthologies
in Antwerp, Paris, and Louvain, starting in 1570 Lasso’s chansons were eventually
gathered together in a series of retrospective Meslanges that were issued by the French
royal printers Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard. Lasso collaborated closely with his
French printers in producing these books. Indeed, the title page of the 1576 edition
of the set proudly proclaims the contents as having been reviewed and approved by
the composer himself. All of this takes on special import when considered against the
backdrop of the decidedly ‘unauthorized’ practice of systematically making and
printing contrafacta of Lasso’s chansons that was undertaken during the 1570s and
1580s by French Protestants in London, La Rochelle, and Geneva (see Table 1).
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